Snow Job (21 page)

Just people. Not ogres, not demons, not a soul ess upper class bent on destroying the planet, no matter what Andrew or Elyce herself would like to believe. If they had been monsters, it would have been easy. But Elyce couldn’t bring herself to see them that way, not knowing them as she did. The issue was not black and white, and for the first time in over a year she found herself forced to acknowledge that her decision to leave Karl had been made as though there were no shades of gray.

Karl was entitled, she now acknowledged, to those shades of gray. She was entitled to them herself, and what was more, she owed it to herself to consider the matter at that level rather than making a life-altering choice based on giving a true-false answer to a question that real y required an essay.

Maybe.
This whole trip, Elyce thought, had been an exercise in exploring the previously unconsidered
maybes
of hers and Karl’s relationship. Maybe they would get back together, maybe they would take their sex life in a new direction, maybe Karl would change the company in a way Elyce had never anticipated. Or maybe Karl was lying in the worst conceivable way.

She looked at him from across the room, from where she stil stood at the arched entry. His shoulders, which usual y looked so impossibly broad and strong, seemed just a little sagged in defeat to her biased eye. He was sitting on the couch watching the proceedings around the tree, holding a mug of Irish coffee but not drinking it. Karl, who usual y seemed at the forefront of any occasion, leading and directing, engaging himself, was just observing. If he was even doing that much, if he was even seeing the family there in front of him. Elyce rather thought he might be entirely in his own mind, judging by his expression, a polite smile that looked pasted on to her discerning eye.

I did that to him
, her automatical y guilty mind prodded.

Normal y she would be able to tel herself, in response to such a thought, that there were other factors. She would tel herself that she did not need to feel guilty because the world was a harsh place, that she was not actual y to blame even though her instinct was to feel that way.

But this time, she knew with a sickening certainty it was al too true. She
had
done that to Karl, as much as or more than he had done it to himself. True, the original choice to change careers midstream had been his, with al its implications regarding Elyce’s politics and philosophies of life wel known when he did it. But the true responsibility for his current state, she thought, fel squarely at her own feet.

The accusation of lying about the construction site had originated with Andrew but she had been the one to believe it, to confront Karl with it as though it were fact. And she knew it was the idea that she would believe him capable of such a thing that bothered Karl, more than he could ever be bothered by an unfounded accusation of dodgy business dealings.

The accusation
was
unfounded. Elyce saw it suddenly, with a clarity that was almost dizzying, making her reach for the heavy wooden jamb of the archway with a shaky hand to support herself.

Karl, the Karl she had married, the man she stil knew, the man this family had brought up, would simply never do something like what Andrew was trying to claim he’d done.

Her Karl would never be capable of doing something like that.

My Karl.

With a sense of rising panic, Elyce wondered for the first time if that were stil true. Was he was stil hers, was he stil waiting for her to come to her senses, as he’d been waiting with surprising patience for so many months? Or had the events of this morning final y convinced him that he was better off letting her leave, if she felt so bent on leaving?

The only problem with that was, Elyce was no longer sure she wanted to leave. In fact, looking across the room at Karl, at his family who were stil dear to her in so many ways, Elyce suddenly felt that she must have been insane to even consider walking away.

Karl looked back over his shoulder just then, saw her standing in the doorway and stopped his gaze at her face as though caught unawares. For a long and painful moment, he and Elyce simply stared at each other. She felt trapped by his eyes, unable to look away. It was Karl who broke off at last, turned his head just a little and sipped his coffee. Elyce saw him grimace and look down at the cup with a frown. The coffee was probably utterly cold by now.

As if confirming her suspicion, Karl got up, stretched his arms slowly and made his way across the sea of wrapping paper trash to head for the kitchen.

Elyce swal owed back a lump of pride and fear, and made herself move to join him there.

* * * * *

“But why didn’t you just drink it in the first place?” Alice was asking Karl with fond irritation, when Elyce walked into the kitchen. “Did I raise you to waste perfectly good whiskey that way, Karl?”

Karl chuckled dutiful y and looked chagrined. “Sorry, Mom. Should I just nuke it then?”

“Good heavens, no. Rinse it out, I’l make you another one. Oh, Elyce, there you are. Bad news from that phone cal earlier? You look like you’ve lost your Christmas cheer.”

Alice was stil bustling happily around the kitchen, brewing more coffee and emptying the dishwasher, paying only passing attention to Elyce. Her question was asked with breezy solicitude, no darker meaning.

“I don’t know yet,” Elyce said. “Maybe bad news.

Maybe I’ve just lost a client, I don’t know.”

Karl raised his eyes to hers sharply but his face bore no expression that might give away his thoughts in response to her comment. Flustered, Elyce cleared her throat and offered to help in the kitchen. A grateful Alice put her to work putting clean dishes away while she turned her own efforts to making French toast for the children, who would otherwise try to eat al the candy from their stockings for breakfast and wind up being sick to their stomachs by midmorning.

Elyce was happy for the task to occupy her hands, to help her feel useful and busy, to give her an excuse not to focus on Karl. Although she was, of course, stil almost entirely focused on Karl. She could feel his eyes on her as she worked at the comfortably familiar job.

If Alice picked up on the tension between her son and his potential ex-wife, she gave no sign of it. Within a few minutes she was cal ing the children in to set the table and serving up their breakfast with the ease of long practice.

It had surprised Elyce at first that there were no servants on the Christmas trip. There never were, although at home, Alice and Bil employed a ful -time housekeeper as wel as a chef and a gardener-cum-chauffeur. They needed the help there, of course. Their house was necessarily large, their schedules were too ful to al ow much extra time for domestic cares, and they also entertained frequently and on the sort of grand scale that their place in San Francisco’s social structure demanded.

But the staff was always given a lengthy break at the holidays, while the family made do for itself in Colorado.

Elyce had thought it odd that they would choose to spend their vacation time having to do housework, when most people would have seen that as the perfect time to relinquish those mundane responsibilities.

In time, Elyce had come to see that the Nashes, Alice in particular, enjoyed the chance to help themselves. Their lifestyle might require them to employ some assistants to get things done on a daily basis but their natural inclination was self-sufficiency, and they needed a vacation from their dependence on the help just as most people needed a vacation from those tedious daily chores. It was a democratic system at the cabin—everyone helped, everyone chipped in and Elyce had never heard a complaint that wasn’t the good-natured sort, because everyone was nice.

They were good people.

“Aunt Elyce, can I have some more juice?”

Little Charles was standing at her side looking boyishly angelic in his Christmas jammies. He had a gap in his smile where he had recently lost a tooth, and his tousled golden curls had clearly not seen a brush that morning.

“Magic word?” Elyce asked automatical y.

“
Pleeeeease
.”

She grinned and opened the refrigerator, pouring the juice careful y and watching Charles until he had safely navigated his way back to the table with it. From out of nowhere she wondered whether, if she and Karl were to have children, they would look so related to the current crop of baby Nashes, who might have easily been brothers and sisters rather than cousins. They al looked alike and were so comfortable with one another. She could see, as though suddenly she had access to a time machine, another few children at this table years down the line, perhaps another cherubic little boy with big blue eyes, or another girl with hair that tumbled down in Shirley Temple ringlets.

Elyce risked a glance at Karl, who was stil seated at the counter and stil watching her with a careful y neutral expression. Drying her hands on a dishtowel, she attempted a tiny smile. Karl just cocked his head, seeming as though he were trying to figure her out. He probably was, she thought.
Good luck, and if you find a solution please
let me know what it is…

“Do you want to ski later?”

She considered his question, looking for hidden traps.

It was such a seemingly straightforward thing to ask.

“I guess. Who al is going?”

“I’m not sure yet. Scott and Emily and the girls, I think.

They may al go snowboarding.”

“But we would actual y go skiing?”

“I think so, yes. I like it better, and I know you don’t real y want to try snowboarding at al .”

“Al right.”

Karl was wearing his business demeanor, sitting as he might in a board meeting, leaning back in his chair, reserving judgment until he had heard al the options and was ready to render his executive decision.

“Wil you do me a favor and forward that picture from your phone? Send it to my email. I want Scott to take a look at it.”

“Oh. Um, okay. I wil . But you don’t have to. I believe you. I mean, I haven’t ever been there in person, I wouldn’t know but I assume you have, so you would know. And…and I believe you.”

“Good to know. Wil you just forward it to me, please?”

“Of course.”

It was al so professional and polite, Elyce felt a return of the overwhelming disconnect that had so struck her when she was looking at the group in the great room earlier. It was as though the previous nights, last night in particular, had never happened. She wanted that other feeling back, that feeling of hope that something might stil be salvageable in the situation. This cordiality was awful, a horrifying turn of events. It felt as though Karl no longer cared enough to be angry with her.

It was a sneak preview, she thought, of what they might be like if they did get divorced and then ran into one another months later in a store or at a work function.

She excused herself from the room and went to the front hal , where the cel phone reception was as strong as it ever got in the cabin. Forwarding the image took only a few seconds. She found herself wondering what Karl planned to have Scott do with it. If it wasn’t a photo of the park site, why would he need it?

Shrugging, trying to put the whole thing out of her mind for the moment so she could go back into the kitchen and make a good show of being in the holiday spirit, Elyce turned her phone off and shoved it back into her purse.

Anybody who might real y need to reach her was either there at the cabin already or knew the number of the landline. Her parents and brother were real y the only other people who mattered to her aside from the people who were already there. Grandparents, a few aunts and uncles and cousins, but any of those would be more likely to pass any earth-shattering news on via Elyce’s parents anyway.

And if Andrew cal ed back…

If Andrew cal ed back he could leave her a message, and she would cal him back when and if she felt so inclined.

“Making more phone cal s?”

Elyce jumped and turned at the sound of Karl’s voice, ending up a few inches away from him, nearly nose to nose.

He had snuck up on her and was standing directly behind her when he spoke.

“You asked me to…to send you that picture.

Remember?” Elyce felt nervous as a cat at Karl’s proximity.

He was brooding and it gave him a dangerous edge, made her feel suddenly very aware of how large a man he was, how able to physical y dominate nearly any situation, although he rarely needed to resort to such measures.

She reminded herself that he had been resorting to those measures quite a bit lately, and the thought generated a sweet tang of interest that she knew was utterly inappropriate to the situation.

Karl had reached out, hands brushing her upper arms, staring down at his own fingers as they slid around her biceps to hold her firmly in place—not that she’d been planning to go anywhere.

“I want…”

When he stopped with a frown, Elyce tried to catch his eye, to get his attention back from wherever it was drifting.

She didn’t know him in this mood.

“You want…?”

“I suppose I shouldn’t worry that you’l take this the wrong way,” he said, so softly it was almost whispering.